MACNA 2011 Presenter Profile: Richard Ross
Richard Ross currently works as an Aquatic Biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences, maintaining many exhibits including the 212,000 gallon Philippine Coral Reef (and going to PI in May to collect corals and cephalopods for the Aquarium). He has kept saltwater animals for over 25 years, and has worked in aquarium maintenance, retail, wholesale and has consulted for a coral farm/fish collecting station in the South Pacific. Richard enjoys all aspects of the aquarium hobby and is a regular author for trade publications, a frequent speaker at aquarium conferences and was a founder of one of the largest and most progressive reef clubs in Northern California, Bay Area Reefers. He is an avid underwater videographer and has been fortunate to scuba dive all over the world. At home he maintains a 300 gallon reef system and a 250 gallon cephalopod/fish breeding system, and was one of the first people to close the life cycle of Sepia bandensis. When not doing all that stuff, he enjoys spending time with his patient wife, his incredible daughter and their menagerie of animals, both wet and dry.
Topic Presentation: Is That Reef Thing You Say True, or Did Someone Just Tell It to You? Making Decisions About Your Reef in the Face of Millions of Contradictory ‘Facts’.
Speaker room - Friday, September 09 3:00 PM
Reef keeping is as much an art as it is a science. There is so much that we don’t understand about what actually goes on inside our boxes of water that we must rely on cultivating a ‘saltwater thumb’ for success over time. Building that saltwater thumb, however, can be a daunting task. There are a million opinions on every aspect of reef keeping, and today's reefkeeper can access those opinions through websites, magazines, online forums, or those antiquated paper book thingies. All that information seems great at first glance, but it turns out that you can find support for every aspect of the hobby regardless of how 'fringe' it may be. The question is, how do you sift through all those opinions to make decisions about what to do with your reef tank? In this presentation, we'll talk about how to deal with conflicting information, and methodologies for making decisions about the different opinions and products that are available to the modern reefkeeper.